Nate Silver Should Start the New Intrade

So many great buying opportunities.

Kevin Drum is skeptical that Nate Silver has anything to add on weather and economics.

But weather, economics, and education? I'm skeptical that you can just parachute into those fields and add a lot of value. They're far more complex, are already heavily populated with sophisticated statistical modeling, and generally require some serious subject matter expertise in addition to raw number-crunching skill.

I don't know what he wants to do on education, but weather and econ sound interesting. It sounds a lot like the Intrade markets I did so well in: climate, politics, and economics. What I want to see is Nate and some rich friends of his create a new Intrade, by taking advantage of the new state laws in NV and NJ for online gambling, which the DoJ said they weren't going to challenge.

This week, New Jersey became the third state, after Delaware and Nevada, to pass an online gambling bill. This came thanks to a complete reversal in policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. For years the agency had said online gambling was illegal—a violation of the Wire Act of 1961 that bans betting across state lines—and had prosecuted the owners of online gaming sites. Then late last year it told states wanting to start online lotteries that the Wire Act applied only to sports betting and not to other games. Industry observers were shocked. “The Justice Department came out 180 degrees opposite of where it was before,” says David Stewart, a lawyer specializing in gambling law at Ropes & Gray. “I’ve never seen that.”

So, I guess I should thank Eric Holder for the eventual return of my denier's tax revenues.